Easter is Christianity's movable feast, unlike Christmas which is a fixed date. What are the roots of its roaming all over the spring months?

My brother, sister and I, already part of a teeny tiny minority of Christians in an almost totally Jewish high school, would always have to explain why our Easter — what my family dubbed “Greek Easter” or Pascha — was usually after “English Easter,” sometimes by as much as five weeks.

What the kids didn’t question was why, unlike Christmas, both moved around the calendar. That’s because their Passover, or Pesach — in fact, all Jewish holidays — move around as well.

Or at least seem to.

For me, the explanation was simple. Jesus was arrested by the Romans after the Last Supper, which had to be a Passover seder dinner because, after all, Jesus was Jewish. So how could Easter ever fall before Passover, as the “English Easter” usually did, while the “Greek Easter” always seemed to be in sync with it?

I know because, at my parent’s deli in Montreal, the mostly Jewish clientele were ordering their smoked meat on matzo while we had to go vegan for Holy Week in keeping with Greek Orthodox tradition.

This year, Greek Easter will once again trail after English Easter, which is Sunday. Greek Easter is the Sunday after that, which is the Sunday after the last day of Passover.

Last seder. Last supper.

Pesach. Pascha.

Get it?

Only it’s not that simple — nor is it really correct.

For one thing, while Jewish holidays move around relative to the Gregorian calendar — the one now used all over the modern world — they are fixed in the Hebrew calendar, now in year 5792. So in that calendar, Passover comes at sunset at the end of the 14th day of the month of Nisan (a.k.a. Aviv), the first month of the Jewish year.

It’s all about the moon really. And the sun. And different calendars. And a whole lot of schisms and squabbles by religious and political leaders over the centuries, schisms and squabbles that led to a split in the church between Rome and Constantinople, west versus east.

But the holidays remain connected, through some dubious math.

Essentially, the Jewish calendar follows lunar cycles of 29 or 30 days and regularly requires correction.

The Greek, or Eastern Orthodox calendar — known as the Julian calendar after Julius Caesar who introduced it in 46 BC — is based on solar cycles.

More or less.

By the 16th century, it was so out of whack that Pope Gregory VIII had another one created. That’s our modern-day calendar, the one with leap years. The Western churches rely on that for their ecclesiastical calculations.

Here’s where it’s important to note that the Orthodox Church predates the Catholic Church. Its earliest adherents, like Jesus, were Jewish and, as a result, many of their traditions were rooted in Judaism. Hence, Easter was tied to 15 Nisan.

But, in the second century, some church leaders, in one of the many political smackdowns they had — smackdowns that would eventually lead to Rome splitting from Constantinople and the creation of the Catholic Church — wanted to cut all ties to Judaism.

“In that early system, Easter could have come on a Tuesday, Thursday or any day of the week,” says professor John Young, interim chair of theology at Queen’s University. “By the end of the second century, Christians agreed that Easter would be celebrated on a Sunday, Christian tradition being that Jesus was raised on the first day of the week, a Sunday.”

Heavens.

Well, yes.

One thing all three feasts have in common is the vernal equinox, which most of us know as the first day of spring.

Passover is always timed for the evening after the first full moon that comes after the spring equinox. That moon is known as the Paschal full moon.

English Easter is the first Sunday after the Paschal full moon. But not necessarily the actual Paschal full moon. Just what the ecclesiastical calendar says is the Paschal full moon.

Greek Easter is also on the first Sunday after the Paschal full moon. But it’s the true, astronomically correct full moon and the actual vernal equinox as observed along the meridian of Jerusalem. It always has to come after Passover because Passover is when Jesus went to Jerusalem and had that last supper.

But what all the celebrations have in common is food, eggs in particular.

There’s also a lamb connection, as anybody who walks the Danforth can discern by butcher shop windows. In Exodus, an “unblemished lamb” must be slaughtered for Passover.

“When you think about it, the imagery of the egg, the use of fresh greens at the Passover ritual all have to do with the renewal of life in the spring and a lot of the symbolism has been taken over by Easter,” explains Carl Ehrlich, professor of humanities at York University.

Interestingly, Easter is never even mentioned in the Bible and the actual English word probably comes from pagan, polytheistic faiths — think Egypt’s Ishtar, or northern Europe’s Eostre or Ostara, goddess of the dawn.

The resurrection of the day.

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